A&M expert: Don’t need to raise gas tax at all
SAN ANTONIO TOLL PARTY
See the Texas Monthly blog entry by reporter Paul Burka here.
See Burka’s His Way or the Highway article blasting privatizing our public highways and the non-competes in these CDA contracts here
Also, to view the video of David Ellis, of the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M, giving this testimony before the Study Commission on Transportation Financing. The Commission’s co-presiding officers are Senator Carona and Representative Krusee. The entire hearing can be viewed here. Ellis flat out says we don’t need to raise the gas tax nor do we need this shift to toll financing, view condensed testimony here.
Link to TTI report for the Governor’s Business Council directly here.
NOT NECESSARY TO TOLL, A&M EXPERT SAYS
By Paul Burka - Texas Monthly blog - TUESDAY, DECEMBER 05, 2006
Few things are duller than a committee meeting in the interim between legislative sessions. Witnesses drone on about policy choices involving arcane issues. Some of the committees exist only for a short duration and will vanish once the legislative session begins in January. The media almost never shows up for these meetings, which explains why the November 28 meeting of the Study Commission on Transportation Financing received virtually no attention. But a few minutes into the hearing, David Ellis, a co-author of a report by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) at Texas A&M, dropped a bombshell on the commission. He said that Texas could finance its highway needs without toll roads. The headline for this post is based on Ellis’s testimony. I have not come across any mainstream media reports of Ellis’s remarks.
Ellis provided the committee with some background on transportation policy. The demand for new and expanded roads in the state’s eight largest metro areas is increasing much faster than TxDot can build them. Over the next 25 years, the population of these areas is projected to increase by 2.8% per year, employment by by 2.3%, vehicles by 2.7%, and daily miles drive by 3%. Over the same period, the number of lane miles that can be built with currently available funding will increase by just .25% per year. Tx-Dot estimates that the state will need an additional $68 billion over the next 25 years to improve mobility. The TTI’s estimate is slightly lower, $66.2 billion. Two-thirds of the needed new construction will be in the state road system, or some $44+ billion; the remainder represents improvements to local roads.
The money for highway construction comes from three sources: vehicle registration fees, the state gasoline (more properly, motor fuels) tax, and reimbursements from the federal gasoline tax, of which Texas sends more revenue to Washington than it gets back. Of these sources, the one that matters the most is the motor fuels tax. But the tax has been losing ground to inflation in recent years.
Now, here is the crucial part of Ellis’s testimony: There are scenarios under which roads can be financed:
1. Raise the motor fuels tax, currently 20 cents per gallon, to 51 cents. Interestingly, a Tx-Dot engineer had previously told the committee that the motor fuels tax would have to be raised to $1.40 per gallon to pay for the needed new construction. Needless to say, the Legislature is not going to raise the tax by 31 cents, much less a buck twenty.
2. Raise the motor fuels tax by 8 cents and index it to inflation, using not the consumer price index, but a special highway construction index. The rate of inflation has been 1/2% to 1 1/2 percent per year.
3. Don’t raise the gasoline tax at all. Instead, index it and put the incremental revenue in the mobility fund, where it can be used to pay off bonds. And here’s the bombshell: “Under this scenario,” Ellis said, ” it wouldn’t be necessary to toll as a means of financing, although that’s certainly an option.”
The cat is out of the bag now. Tolls aren’t the only way to pay for new roads. Will the Legislature allow Tx-Dot to go forward with its mammoth toll road plan, or will lawmakers devise a solution that will allow revenue to be used to build free roads?
Showing posts with label indexing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indexing. Show all posts
Monday, August 27, 2007
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Governor emphasis on tollways, private road-builders has generated urban and rural unrest
By Ben Wear - AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF - Sunday, August 20, 2006
Excerpts from a long story last year on Perry's transportation policy.
Perry, with his famously well-coiffed look and perfectly tailored suits, surely doesn't look the part of a revolutionary, and he rejects that characterization. But he acknowledges that transportation is the area where he made the most "wide-sweeping" changes.
Perry declared the gasoline tax a lame duck, dismissing talk of raising it. Perry and his allies decreed that all new road projects would be evaluated for tolls. They contemplated slapping tolls on existing roads, then backed off after a public outcry.
Perry in early 2002 outlined what seemed to be a pie-in-the-sky plan for 4,000 miles of rural toll roads called the Trans-Texas Corridor. After hearing people scoff for more than two years, Perry introduced some Spaniards who said they'd spend $7.2 billion on the first 300-mile piece, including a $1.2 billion payment to the state. And Perry's Department of Transportation declared Texas "open for business," inviting private companies — foreign or domestic — to privately finance and operate the next generation of Texas expressways and railroads.
"What is happening in Texas on public-private partnerships is being watched by every state in the union and several foreign countries," Perry said during a late July interview in his Capitol office.
"When I parachuted in here on Dec. 21, 2000, I inherited a state that had huge infrastructure challenges."
Gas tax not enough
Evaluating just how huge that challenge was — is it a crisis or just an emerging problem? — has involved an escalating war of statistics over the past couple of years.
The state's population has increased more than 20 percent since 1990 and annual miles traveled on the state's roads have gone up about 50 percent. Meanwhile, the Texas highway system, with increasing maintenance costs and more expensive urban construction needs, grew only 4 percent during that decade and a half.
The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from those numbers, one borne out by most people's experience behind the wheel, is that Texas roads are more congested than they were 15 years ago.
The state Transportation Department's budget, meanwhile, has tripled since 1990, including an 80 percent jump from the budget Perry inherited from George W. Bush to this year's $7.7 billion spending plan.
Perry and his people say that's still not nearly enough to deal with the state's transportation needs now or, especially, in the future. Using figures gleaned by asking local transportation planners what they would build if money were no object, they say the state will have $86 billion in unmet transportation needs over the next 25 years. [NOTE: Perry's Governor's Taskforce on Transportation later revised this down to a $44 billion shortfall.]
They say the only way to close that gap, to extinguish the blaze, as it were, is to put tolls on every road you can and recruit private capital to build as many new toll roads as possible. Increasing the state gasoline tax, frozen at 20 cents a gallon since 1991, is not an option, Perry and his fellow GOP legislative leaders say, particularly with unleaded gas selling for close to $3 a gallon. But that was already his position when gas was selling for well under $2 a gallon.
...A few cents, in Perry's view, would be irrelevant. Each penny raises about $100 million in a year, or enough for one fair-sized freeway interchange with flyover bridges. So a 20-cent increase, which would give Texas the highest gas tax of any state, would bring in an extra $2 billion a year. Perry says that wouldn't be nearly enough to return Texas' transportation system to its former lofty status among states, particularly as hybrid vehicles and other improvements from Detroit increase gas efficiency and cause gas tax revenue to sag.
A 20-cents-a-gallon increase in the tax would cost the average driver about $100 a year. That's much less than a driver regularly commuting on a toll road would pay. The U.S. 183-A tollway due to open next year (in Austin) will cost $2 for one trip through, or about $1,000 a year for a five-day-a-week commuter.
Read more
Excerpts from a long story last year on Perry's transportation policy.
Perry, with his famously well-coiffed look and perfectly tailored suits, surely doesn't look the part of a revolutionary, and he rejects that characterization. But he acknowledges that transportation is the area where he made the most "wide-sweeping" changes.
Perry declared the gasoline tax a lame duck, dismissing talk of raising it. Perry and his allies decreed that all new road projects would be evaluated for tolls. They contemplated slapping tolls on existing roads, then backed off after a public outcry.
Perry in early 2002 outlined what seemed to be a pie-in-the-sky plan for 4,000 miles of rural toll roads called the Trans-Texas Corridor. After hearing people scoff for more than two years, Perry introduced some Spaniards who said they'd spend $7.2 billion on the first 300-mile piece, including a $1.2 billion payment to the state. And Perry's Department of Transportation declared Texas "open for business," inviting private companies — foreign or domestic — to privately finance and operate the next generation of Texas expressways and railroads.
"What is happening in Texas on public-private partnerships is being watched by every state in the union and several foreign countries," Perry said during a late July interview in his Capitol office.
"When I parachuted in here on Dec. 21, 2000, I inherited a state that had huge infrastructure challenges."
Gas tax not enough
Evaluating just how huge that challenge was — is it a crisis or just an emerging problem? — has involved an escalating war of statistics over the past couple of years.
The state's population has increased more than 20 percent since 1990 and annual miles traveled on the state's roads have gone up about 50 percent. Meanwhile, the Texas highway system, with increasing maintenance costs and more expensive urban construction needs, grew only 4 percent during that decade and a half.
The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from those numbers, one borne out by most people's experience behind the wheel, is that Texas roads are more congested than they were 15 years ago.
The state Transportation Department's budget, meanwhile, has tripled since 1990, including an 80 percent jump from the budget Perry inherited from George W. Bush to this year's $7.7 billion spending plan.
Perry and his people say that's still not nearly enough to deal with the state's transportation needs now or, especially, in the future. Using figures gleaned by asking local transportation planners what they would build if money were no object, they say the state will have $86 billion in unmet transportation needs over the next 25 years. [NOTE: Perry's Governor's Taskforce on Transportation later revised this down to a $44 billion shortfall.]
They say the only way to close that gap, to extinguish the blaze, as it were, is to put tolls on every road you can and recruit private capital to build as many new toll roads as possible. Increasing the state gasoline tax, frozen at 20 cents a gallon since 1991, is not an option, Perry and his fellow GOP legislative leaders say, particularly with unleaded gas selling for close to $3 a gallon. But that was already his position when gas was selling for well under $2 a gallon.
...A few cents, in Perry's view, would be irrelevant. Each penny raises about $100 million in a year, or enough for one fair-sized freeway interchange with flyover bridges. So a 20-cent increase, which would give Texas the highest gas tax of any state, would bring in an extra $2 billion a year. Perry says that wouldn't be nearly enough to return Texas' transportation system to its former lofty status among states, particularly as hybrid vehicles and other improvements from Detroit increase gas efficiency and cause gas tax revenue to sag.
A 20-cents-a-gallon increase in the tax would cost the average driver about $100 a year. That's much less than a driver regularly commuting on a toll road would pay. The U.S. 183-A tollway due to open next year (in Austin) will cost $2 for one trip through, or about $1,000 a year for a five-day-a-week commuter.
Read more
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